Google is renowned as an employer for the perks and benefits it offers. Among the more extreme is the idea of being able to work on your own startup without leaving the company.

Google's policy of encourage business units within the company to act as independent units was formalised last year when it extended this freedom to the Slide team, a recently acquired social gaming company. It was then seen as a move to retain its new employees.

Now according to Silicon Alley Insider the program isn't just for new acquisitions and the teams being supported in working on their own projects, complete with a satellite office provided by Google, are typically very small with around five employees. The rationale is to keep talented developers who might otherwise leave the company and the units don't have to report to anybody for about two years.

While this sounds promising the model project referred to is that of Wave, a tool developed by an Australian team that was first possibly mis-promoted by Google, then killed off by it when it failed to take off and then absorbed into an open source project - not an entirely happy history for a promising API.

SAI also reported last week that Google has recently paid out multi-million sums to ensure that it didn't lose two of top product mangers to Twitter. Although there is dispute about the actual amounts of the payments made to Neal Mohar and Sundar Pinchai the figures are in the tens of millions proving that money is still a very powerful motive for staying with Google.

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